An update on our adopted musher DeeDee Jonrowe. She is presently in 17th place, with 13 dogs left (of 16), and taking her mandatory 24 hour layover in Takotna, 419 miles in out of 1,049. (Every musher must take one 24 hour layover and two 8 hour layovers; as a matter of strategy most mushers get the layovers over with early in the nine day race, so they can sprint to the finish.) With less than half the race run, she is very much in the hunt.

The conditions this year are hard and fast, which does not favor DeeDee’s team; she prefers a wet slog :) Later as the teams approach Norton Sound crappy weather is expected which may help her.

If you’re looking for an indication of how she’s doing, after getting lost early on (!) and losing a couple of dogs, she has posted the fastest speed over the last leg to Tekotna of any team, so she’s running well. Six teams have dropped out and 56 are still racing.

I’ve found a great source of ongoing information is the Iditarodblog. Another good source is the Anchorage Daily News. This is *the* sporting event in Alaska and is televised live there. A recent innovation is GPS trackers; I’m trying to figure out if there’s an online way to follow DeeDee’s progress, stay tuned.

A quiet, wonderful, lonely, weird evening; had a good day, much progress on many fronts, had some good news, had a good workout tonight, and a nice little dinner. But the sum of all that is ... I feel quiet and weird. Does that ever happen to you?

This is massively cool: you are listening to Los Angeles. Images interspersed with music overlaid by police radio. Captures the essence of the city of angles; it truly is the center. Not a place to visit, but a place to *live*. It's all happening there, all the time, good and bad, ...

Readability goes full HTML5. Didn't seem to take them very long ... wonder about the usability of the web app versus the native app. I'm sure we'll find out soon.

And this is interesting: HP to include webOS on all PCs. Ars Technical calls it 'a shot across Microsoft's bow', implying that webOS might supercede Windows? At least for some users, it might. We were just having a debate in our house about whether a new student going off to college really needs a laptop or could use an iPad. Given a decent keyboard, not clear.

Can you beat a computer at Rock - Paper - Scissors? I could not. Would be interesting to write a program to fool and thereby defeat this one :)

A bittersweet finale for the Space Shuttle. A magnificent technical achievement but always it was a $10 solution to a $5 problem. Putting stuff into orbit doesn't require people, and hence doesn't require the launch vehicle to return safely. Still - 39 flights, 5,570 orbits, 150 million miles, and a pretty good safety record.